The greatest inventors and most skilful practitioners of the political art in the modern world have been the English, for it is the English who, of all nations, have held closest to the ideal of freedom in its many and various manifestations. Superficially regarded, the English are a stupid people, and so their continental neighbours have often regarded them. But their racial heritage and their island situation seem to have given them just that combination of experience and natural endowment necessary to success in the task of government. Taken as a whole, the English are not brilliant, but they are clear-headed: they are not far-sighted, but they can see the fact before their eyes: they are ill equipped with theoretical knowledge, but they understand the working of institutions and have a good eye for judging character: they have little constructive imagination of the more grandiose sort, but they have an instinct for the 'next step' which has often set them on paths which have led them far further than they dreamed; above all, they have a relatively high standard of individual character and public duty, without which no organization involving the free co-operation of man and man can hope to be effective. It is this unique endowment of moral qualities and practical gifts, coupled with unrivalled opportunities, which has made the English the pioneers in modern times in the art of human association. Englishmen, accustomed to what eighteenth-century writers used to call 'the peculiar felicity of British freedom', do not always remember how far their own experience has carried them on the road of political progress. They do not realize how many problems they have solved and abolished, as the art of medicine has abolished diseases. When they hear speak of the eternal conflict between Nationality and Nationality, they often forget that a war between England and Scotland has long since become unthinkable and that the platitudes of St. Andrew's Day are still paradoxes in Central and Eastern Europe. When they are told of States where the spontaneous manifestations of group-life, non-conforming sects, workmen's associations, and ordinary social clubs, are driven underground and classed as dangerous secret societies, they should realize how precious a thing is that freedom of association which is one of the dearest attributes of English liberty. So too when they read of monarchical and military supremacy in a country like Germany, which is still politically speaking in the stage of England under the Tudors, or of Russian autocracy, or of the struggle over the King's prerogative which has been taking place in Greece. If we believe, as we must, in the cause of liberty, let us not be too modest to say that nations which have not yet achieved responsible self-government, whether within or without the British Commonwealth, are politically backward, and let us recall the long stages of political invention by which our own self-government has been achieved. Representation, trial by jury, an independent judiciary, equality before the law, habeas corpus, a limited monarchy, the practice of ministerial responsibility, religious toleration, the freedom of printing and association, colonial autonomy—all these are distinctly English inventions, but time has shown that most of them are definite additions to the universal art of government. We can survey the Balkans, for instance, and say with confidence that one thing, amongst others, that those nations are in need of is toleration, both in the sphere of nationality and of religion: or declare of the United States that their industrial future will be menaced till they have freed Trade Unionism from the threat of the so-called law of Conspiracy: or ask of our own so-called self-governing Dominions whether they are content with a system that concedes them no responsible control over the issues of peace and war. This is not to say that our own governmental machinery is perfect. Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling. It is only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary disillusionment can shake, that it is founded on enduring principles which are not political but moral. To compare a system which aims at freedom and seeks to attain that aim through the working of responsible self-government with systems, however logically perfect or temporarily effective, which set no value on either, is, as it were, to compare black with white. It is to go back on the lessons of centuries of experience and to deny the cause, not of liberty alone, but of that progress of the spirit of man which it is the highest object of liberty to promote.

We have no time here to discuss in detail the various English inventions in the art of politics, but we must pause to consider two of the most important, because they are typical of British methods. The first is the invention called the Principle of Representation. Representation is a device by which, and by which alone, the area of effective government can be extended without the sacrifice of liberty. It is a device by which the scattered many can make their will prevail over the few at the centre. Under any non-representative system, whether in a State or a Church or a Trade Union or any other association, men always find themselves set before the inexorable dilemma between freedom and weakness on the one hand and strength and tyranny on the other. Either the State or the association has to be kept small, so that the members themselves can meet and keep in touch with all that goes on. Or it is allowed to expand and grow strong, in which case power becomes concentrated at the centre and the great body of members loses all effective control. The ancient world saw no way out of this dilemma. The great Oriental monarchies never contemplated even the pretence of popular control. The city-states of Greece, where democracy originated, set such store in consequence by the personal liberty of the individual citizen, that they preferred to remain small, and suffered the inevitable penalty of their weakness. Rome, growing till she overshadowed the world, sacrificed liberty in the process. Nor was the Christian Church, when it became a large-scale organization, able to overcome the dilemma. It was not till thirteenth-century England that a way out was found. Edward I in summoning two burgesses from each borough and two knights from each shire to his model Parliament in 1295, hit on a method of doing business which was destined to revolutionize the art of government. He stipulated that the men chosen by their fellows to confer with him must come, to quote the exact words of the summons, armed with 'full and sufficient power for themselves and for the community of the aforesaid county, and the said citizens and burgesses for themselves and the communities of the aforesaid cities and boroughs separately, there and then, for doing what shall then be ordained according to the Common Council in the premises, so that the aforesaid business shall not remain unfinished in any way for defect of this power'. In other words, the members were to come to confer with the king not as individuals speaking for themselves alone, but as representatives. Their words and acts were to bind those on whose behalf they came, and those who chose them were to do so in the full knowledge that they would be so bound. In choosing them the electors deliberately surrendered their own share of initiative and sovereignty and combined to bestow it on a fellow citizen whom they trusted. In this way, and in this way alone, the people of Cornwall and of Northumberland could bring their wishes to bear and play their part, together with the people at the centre, in the government of a country many times the size of a city-state of ancient Greece. There had been assemblies before in all ages of history: but this was something different. It was a Parliament.

Representation seems to us such an obvious device that we often forget how comparatively modern it is and what a degree of responsibility and self-control it demands both in the representative and in those whom he represents. It is very unpleasant to hear of things done or acquiesced in by our representatives of which we disapprove, and to have to remember that it is our own fault for not sending a wiser or braver man to Westminster in his place. It is still more unpleasant for a representative to feel, as he often must, that his own honest opinion and conscience draw him one way on a matter of business and the opinions of most of his constituents another. But these are difficulties inherent in the system, and for which there is no remedy but sincerity and patience. It is part of the bargain that a constituency should not be able to disavow a representative: and that a representative should feel bound to use his own best judgement on the issues put before him. To turn the representative, as there is a tendency to do in some quarters, into a mere mouthpiece with a mandate, is to ignore the very problem which made representation necessary, and to presume that a local mass-meeting can be as well informed or take as wide a view as those who have all the facts before them at the centre. The ancient Greeks, who had a strong sense of individuality, were loth to believe that any one human being could make a decision on behalf of another. In the deepest sense of course they were right. But government, as has been said, is at best a rough business. Representation is no more than a practical compromise: but it is a compromise which has been found to work. It has made possible the extension of free government to areas undreamed of. It has enabled the general sense of the inhabitants of the United States, an area nearly as large as Europe, to be concentrated at Washington, and it may yet make it possible to collect the sense of self-governing Dominions in four continents in a Parliament at London. All this lay implicit in the practical instructions sent by the English king to his sheriffs; but its development would only have been possible in a community where the general level of character was a high one and where men were, therefore, in the habit of placing implicit trust in one another. The relationship of confidence between a member of Parliament and his constituents, or a Trade Union leader and his rank and file, is a thing of which public men are rightly proud: for it reflects honour on both parties and testifies to an underlying community of purpose which no passing disagreement on details can break down.

Representation paved the way for the modern development of responsible self-government. But it is important to recognize that the two are not the same thing. Responsible self-government, in its modern form, is a separate and more complex English invention in the art of government. A community may be decked out with a complete apparatus of representative institutions and yet remain little better than an autocracy. Modern Germany is a case in point. The parliamentary suffrage for the German Reichstag is more representative than that for the British House of Commons. The German workman is better represented in his Parliament than the British workman is in ours. But the German workman has far less power to make his will effective in matters of policy than the British, because the German constitution does not embody the principle of responsible self-government. Sovereignty still rests with the Kaiser as it rested in the thirteenth century with Edward I. The Imperial Chancellor is not responsible to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser, by whom he is appointed and whose personal servant he remains. The Reichstag can discuss the actions of the Chancellor: it can advise him, or protest to him, or even pass votes of censure against him; but it cannot make its will effective. We can observe the working of similar representative institutions in different parts of the British Commonwealth. The provinces of India and many British Colonies have variously composed representative assemblies, but in all cases without the power to control their executives. The self-governing Dominions, on the other hand, do enjoy responsible self-government, but in an incomplete form, because the most vital of all issues of policy are outside their control. On questions of foreign policy, and the issues of war and peace, the Parliaments of the Dominions, and the citizens they represent, are, constitutionally speaking, as helpless as the most ignorant native in the humblest dependency. Representative institutions in themselves thus no more ensure real self-government than the setting up of a works committee of employees in a factory would ensure that the workmen ran the factory. The distinction between representation and effective responsibility is so simple that it seems a platitude to mention it. Yet it is constantly ignored, both in this country by those who speak of Colonial self-government as though the Dominions really enjoyed the same self-government as the people of these islands, and by the parties in Germany whose programme it is, not to make Germany a truly constitutional country, but to assimilate the retrograde Prussian franchise to the broader representation of the Reichstag.

Wherein does the transition from representation to full responsibility consist? It came about in England when Parliament, instead of merely being consulted by the sovereign, felt itself strong enough to give orders to the sovereign. The sovereign naturally resisted, as the Kaiser and the Tsar will resist in their turn; but in this country the battle was fought and won in the seventeenth century. Since that time, with a few vacillations, Parliament has been the sovereign power. But once this transfer of sovereignty has taken place, a new problem arises. A Parliament of several hundred members, even though it meets regularly, is not competent to transact the multitudinous and complex and highly specialized business of a modern State. The original function of Parliament was to advise, to discuss, and to criticize. It is not an instrument fit for the work of execution and administration. Having become sovereign, its first business must be to create out of its own members an instrument which should carry out its own policy and be responsible to itself for its actions. Hence arose the Cabinet. The Cabinet is, as it were, a distillation of Parliament, just as Parliament itself is a distillation of the country. It consists of members of Parliament and it is in constant touch with Parliament; but its methods are not the methods of Parliament but of the older, more direct, organs of government which Parliament superseded. It meets in secret: it holds all the strings of policy: it has almost complete control of political and legislative initiative: it decides what is to be done and when and how: it has its own staff of agents and confidential advisers in the Departments and elsewhere whose acts are largely withdrawn from the knowledge and criticism of Parliament. A modern Cabinet in fact is open to the charge of being autocracy in a new guise. Such a charge would, of course, be a gross overstatement. But there is no doubt that the increasing complexity in the tasks of government has led to a corresponding growth of power and organization at the centre which has strengthened the Cabinet immeasurably of recent years at the expense of the direct representatives of the people. There are, however, powerful influences at work in the opposite direction, towards decentralization and new forms of representation, which there is no space to touch on here. Suffice it to say that here, as elsewhere, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges of British citizenship have been placed by the progress of events in a position of peculiar responsibility. The twentieth century finds us the centre of the widest experiment of self-government which the world has ever seen; for the principles of liberty, first tested in this island, have approved themselves on the soil of North America, Australasia, and South Africa. It finds us also responsible for the government and for the training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth, about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that internationalizing of the world, to which reference has already been made. It represents the control of law and organized government over the blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of this control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes selfish. But 'the situation of man', as Burke finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is the preceptor of his duty'. The perseverance of the British character, its habit of concentration on the work that lies to hand, and the influence of our traditional social and political ideals, have slowly brought us to a deeper insight, till to-day the Commonwealth is becoming alive to the real nature of its task—the extension and consolidation of liberty. If it has thus taken up, in part, the work of the mediaeval Empire and has had a measure of success where the other failed, it is because of the character of its individual citizens, because despite constant and heart-breaking failures in knowledge and imagination, we are a people who, in the words of a stern, if friendly, critic, 'with great self-assertion and a bull-dog kind of courage, have yet a singular amount of gentleness and tenderness'.[66]

We have come to the end of our long survey. Some of you may feel that I have fetched too wide a compass and given too wide an extension to the meaning of government. But if I have sinned I have sinned of set purpose. I refuse to confine government within the limits of what is ordinarily called politics, or to discuss the association called the State in isolation from other sides of man's community life. To do so, I feel, is to lay oneself open to one of two opposite errors: the error of those for whom the State is the Almighty, and who invest it with a superhuman morality and authority of its own; and the error of those who draw in their skirts in horror from the touch of what Nietzsche called this 'cold monster' and take refuge in monastic detachment from the political responsibilities of their time. We must be able to see politics as a part of life before we can see it steadily and see it whole. We must be able to see it in relation to the general ordering of the world and to connect it once more, as in the Middle Ages, with religion and morality. No thinking man can live through such a time as this and preserve his faith unless he is sustained by the belief that the clash of States which is darkening our generation is not a mere blind collision of forces, but has spiritual bearings which affect each individual living soul born or to be born in the world. It is not for us to anticipate the verdict of history. But what we can do is to bear ourselves worthily, in thought and speech, like our soldiers in action, of the times in which we live—to testify, as it were, in our own lives, to that for which so many of our friends have laid down theirs. We are met at a culminating moment of human fate—when, so far as human judgement can discern, the political destinies of this planet are being settled for many generations to come—perhaps for good. If the task of leadership in the arts of government remains with us, let us face the responsibility conscious of the vast spiritual issues which it involves, and let us so plan and act that history, looking back on these years of blood, may date from them a new birth of freedom and progress, not for ourselves in this country alone but throughout that kingdom of Man which must one day, as we believe, become in very truth the kingdom of God.

Books for Reference

1.Man's Control over Nature:
Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, and other essays. 1912.
Demolins, Comment la route crée le type social.
Curtis (ed. by), The Commonwealth of Nations. Vol. i, 1916.
Murphy, The Basis of Ascendancy. 1909.
Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Greenwood and others). 1916.
2.Political Ideals:
The Jews: Todd, Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel. 1904.
Greece: Aristotle's Politics, translated by B. Jowett. 1908.
Dickinson, The Greek View of Life. 1909.
Barker, The Political thought of Plato and Aristotle. 1908.
Rome: H. Stuart Jones, The Roman Empire. (Story of the Nations.) 1908. Warde Fowler, Rome (Home University Series).
The Middle Ages: A. L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages. 1911.
Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages (introduction by Maitland). 1900.
Miscellaneous: Wallas, Human Nature in Politics. 1908.
Acton, The History of Freedom, and other essays. 1909.
Lowell, The Government of England.
Bülow, Imperial Germany. 1916.